The greatest mistake of Bud Selig's time as baseball's leader occurred in 2006, when he commissioned George Mitchell to investigate Major League Baseball's steroid era. For the cost of about $20 million, Mitchell generated what was mostly a cut-and-paste job of previously published confessions and revelations. After reading the report, one baseball executive drolly noted that an office supply store could've put together something similar at a much lower cost.

The former senator did contribute some original work, using his ties to law enforcement to strong-arm former New York Mets clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski into revealing titillating new details. But in the end, the lasting impact of the Mitchell report was to cast the names of 86 players to the public mob to be tarred and feathered without respect to context.

The Mitchell report glossed over the sport’s institutional failures and didn’t touch on the specific decisions made by those in power. Mitchell picked out those 86 players, rather than acknowledging that over a period of more than two decades, it was likely that thousands and thousands of players in the majors and minors used performance-enhancing drugs.

Selig was elected to the Hall of Fame earlier this month, sparking some writers to say that if Selig is a Hall of Famer -- Bud Selig, the commissioner of the sport during the steroid era -- well, then just let in all the cheats, because Selig enabled the problem. Selig was a big part of the problem. Selig was a source of the problem.

This line of thinking is as unfair and ridiculous as the Mitchell report: Context means everything. Context matters.